Papers › Tonic: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Library for Fast Prototyping and Benchmarking

Tonic: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Library for Fast Prototyping and Benchmarking

15 Nov 2020arXiv:2011.07537archive 2025-07-28

Fabio Pardo

Deep reinforcement learning has been one of the fastest growing fields of machine learning over the past years and numerous libraries have been open sourced to support research. However, most codebases have a steep learning curve or limited flexibility that do not satisfy a need for fast prototyping in fundamental research. This paper introduces Tonic, a Python library allowing researchers to quickly implement new ideas and measure their importance by providing: 1) general-purpose configurable modules 2) several baseline agents: A2C, TRPO, PPO, MPO, DDPG, D4PG, TD3 and SAC built with these modules 3) support for TensorFlow 2 and PyTorch 4) support for continuous-control environments from OpenAI Gym, DeepMind Control Suite and PyBullet 5) scripts to experiment in a reproducible way, plot results, and play with trained agents 6) a benchmark of the provided agents on 70 continuous-control tasks. Evaluation is performed in fair conditions with identical seeds, training and testing loops, while sharing general improvements such as non-terminal timeouts and observation normalization. Finally, to demonstrate how Tonic simplifies experimentation, a novel agent called TD4 is implemented and evaluated.

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flip fabiopardo/tonic/tonic/plot.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · d290b3d01334e44b · report
smooth fabiopardo/tonic/tonic/plot.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 46219a361cf4422a · report
stats fabiopardo/tonic/tonic/plot.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · 6f19c3ae22dd20dd · report
play_control_suite fabiopardo/tonic/tonic/play.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · c1ecf83f8276755b · report

Tasks

BenchmarkingContinuous ControlDeep Reinforcement LearningOpenAI GymReinforcement Learning (RL)continuous-controlreinforcement-learning

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Methods

1x1 ConvolutionA2CAdamAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationClipped Double Q-learningConvolutionD4PGDDPGDense ConnectionsDilated ConvolutionEntropy RegularizationExperience ReplayGlobal Average PoolingN-step ReturnsPPOPrioritized Experience ReplayReLUSACTD3TRPOTarget Policy SmoothingWeight Decay

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